I've been playing persona 4 on PCSX2 for about 2 days now, still not too far, and luckily the only place i seem to lose frames anymore is in battles since i've found a decent set up of speed hacks, that being said, unlike some people i've seen, its every single battle. And it definitely makes the combat less than fun to deal with. So i was wondering if anyone knew of settings or plugins or any sort of different rom files that either;
1. Reduce/Remove sources of lag from battles, i.e. Shadows, Background Structures, etc.
OR
2. Makes it so when your games loses frames, instead of slowing down, it just skips the frames entirely, like if you have 30fps, it plays at normal speed, just with half as many frames playing.

If anyone knows how to do either of those things, it'd be much appreciated.

I'm aware that specs are everything when it comes to emulators, which is why I'm looking to lower the amount of processing required to play the game, instead of up-ing the amount my PC can handle. (Fancy talk for my PC is average and I can't afford anything better)

Usually setting both EE and VU hacks to 3 cause false fps, that is it will say full speed in the title bar but be noticeably not full speed.

Well, there is really only one thing I can think of to try, but before I tell you how to do it, let me ask you: Do you care if the game drops some frames as long as it's full speed? I.e. are you willing to trade of the fluidness of the animation to make it play at normal speed?

(03-25-2014, 03:42 AM)Blyss Sarania Wrote: Usually setting both EE and VU hacks to 3 cause false fps, that is it will say full speed in the title bar but be noticeably not full speed.

Well, there is really only one thing I can think of to try, but before I tell you how to do it, let me ask you: Do you care if the game drops some frames as long as it's full speed? I.e. are you willing to trade of the fluidness of the animation to make it play at normal speed?

On the first thing you said, im well aware of false frames, but I can tell from the audio slowness that it atleast SLIGHTLY helps the FPS, and the second thing you said is EXACTLY what i meant by option 2 on the main post. So i'd love to hear your method.

Well, it's not guaranteed to work and it's not guaranteed to not break stuff.

First make sure you are using the latest SVN version of PCSX2. Get it from http://buildbot.orphis.net/pcsx2 (You will need it as this is a recently added feature.)

Then go to the PCSX2 folder, and then the ini subfolder. Open the pcsx2_vm.ini in notepad. Find the [EmuCore/Speedhacks] section and then in that the
EECycleRate setting.

The main UI only lets you set the EE hack to 3, but in the INI, a recent change was made where you can set insane amounts up to 99. Of course 99 is largely useless as you end up with like 1 FPS.

So what you should do is this. Make a savestate in battle for easy testing. Turn OFF the VU hack for now, to make testing more stable. In the ini, set the EE cycle rate hack to 5, save the ini and then start PCSX2, run the game, load your state and test. Then try a bigger number. If it's still seriously slow increase by 5 each time. So 10, 15, etc. Basically keep bumping it up to see if you can find a sweet spot. Note you need to close PCSX2 each time you edit the ini.

So:
Edit ini and increase EECycleRate value
Save ini(you don't have to close it)
Run PCSX2
Test
Close PCSX2
Repeat.

This will likely only help if the CPU EE thread is slowing the game down. In the game window are EE and GS%, if the EE% is the high one, then this may help, if the GS is, prolly not. Once you find a decent spot, you can turn VU stealing back on if you need it. Of course not if you don't!

And again this may cause serious weirdness and or instability, that's why you can't do it from the UI. But worth a shot. Good luck. Persona 4 is one of my favorite games ever.

Edit: As for your option 1, in config->video->plugin settings you can try enabling hardware hacks, then configuring them and try various skipdraw values. You might get lucky and one might disable an effect and get you a speedup. Not too likely though.